Why 'Spider-Man: Homecoming 2' Is Marvel's Best Choice To Start Phase Four

We just got the first trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming late last week, and now the sequel already has a release date. Deadlinereported on Friday night that Spider-Man: Homecoming 2 (actual title pending) will debut on July 5, 2019. We've seen plenty of instances of late where sequels got dated before under-performing predecessors caused said sequels to be canceled. Think Fantastic Four 2 or Terminator: Genisys 2 just in 2015. But let's assume that Spider-Man: Homecoming, which opens July 7, 2017, is at least popular enough to merit a sequel. It's a smart date for the Sony franchise and an even better one for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

First of all, it's a week after Transformers 7 and two weeks before Walt Disney's new Indiana Jones movie. It yet again puts Spidey into the Independence Day weekend rush. Spider-Man 2 snagged a $180 million Wed-Mon debut over the holiday in 2004 and The Amazing Spider-Man earned $137m over its Tues-Sun debut back in 2012. Actually, Spider-Man: Homecoming will be the first Spidey movie not to open either over the holiday or on the "first summer weekend in May" slot, although that's as much a fluke of the calendar as anything else. So yeah, opening around the July 4th is pretty standard for the Spidey franchise.

'Spider-Man: Homecoming' image courtesy of Sony

But it's a more interesting date choice when you look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole.

May 2019 sees the release of the untitled Avengers movie that will basically be the end of Phase 3 and the end of the long-running story that began in 2008 with Iron Man. I have no idea what the MCU will look like after the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy team up to take down Thanos. And I have no idea what movies will make up the so-called Phase 4 of the MCU, although you can guess it will involve the likes of Doctor Strange 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and some lesser known characters being introduced with the hopes of starting new stand-alone franchises.

But Spider-Man: Homecoming 2 will be the first MCU movie to debut after the presumably status quo-altering events of The Movie Previously Known As Avengers: Infinity War part II. If, and this is a big "if," we end up in an MCU without major roles for Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, then the goal is to build an MCU centered around the newly introduced likes of Doctor Strange, Black Panther and Captain Marvel. And if the Phase Four MCU arrives with a radically skewed status quo, then Marvel's most famous and most popular superhero is the very definition of a soft landing.

Both in terms of audience readjustment and likely box office glory, starting off Phase Four with a Spider-Man movie makes a resounding amount of sense. It's familiar ground with a familiar character, presumably getting that awkward "everyone goes to college and/or their separate ways but still somehow hang out all the time" phase off to a risk-free start. Then, and this is presuming that Spider-Man: Homecoming is popular enough that its sequel qualifies as "risk-free," you can start basing franchises around characters so obscure that I've never even heard of them.

If Marvel had owned the movie rights to Spider-Man way back in the day, there is a decent chance that Peter Parker would have been our gateway drug/introduction into the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it's good that they didn't have the rights to the likes of Spider-Man or Wolverine, since it forced Marvel to do the hard work of turning the likes of Iron Man and Thor into A-list movie franchises. But once the first big mega-story comes to an end in May of 2019, it will be oddly fitting that Spider-Man, Marvel's flagship character, will be our come down after the chaos of "Everyone versus Thanos" and our palette cleanser before whatever Phase Four throws our way.

Spider-Man wasn't our introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but he will serve as our gateway drug into Phase Four. Beyond that, I still hope we don't get any Phase Four movie announcements before Avengers: What Kind of Day Has It Been opens on May 3, 2019. How wonderful would it be to walk into the "Phase Three finale" not really knowing what would transpire for the universe or for our favorite characters? But announcing Spider-Man: Homecoming 2 and placing it over the 2019 holiday weekend spoils nothing about the upcoming films, since it's not like Spidey was brought into the MCU just to be murdered by Thanos. And it will be an ideal "come down" of familiar comfort food before the post-Infinity War MCU begins to take shape

I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last ten years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing s...